October 22, 2007

The real "war on children"

....Etc. So what is the best thing America could do "for the children"? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. Most of us understand, for example, that Social Security needs to be "fixed" – or we'll have to raise taxes, or the retirement age, or cut benefits, etc. But, just to get the entitlements debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities in the United States are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of our gross domestic product. In Greece, the equivalent figure is 25 percent – that's not a matter of raising taxes or tweaking retirement age; that's total societal collapse.

So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.....

....I'm in favor of tax credits for child health care, and Health Savings Accounts for adults, and any other reform that emphasizes the citizen's responsibility to himself and his dependants. But middle-class entitlement creep would be wrong even if was affordable, even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover it every month: it turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the Nanny State. As Gerald Ford likes to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. As I point out in my book, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and who cares if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?

That's the real "war on children": in Europe, it's killing their future. Don't make the same mistake here.

What the Dems are trying to do is literally a "war on children." The results of the kinds of policies they advocate are plain to see in Europe, and yet they are still pushing them. One invariable outcome of "Euro-socialism" is that children stop being born. The birth-rate has dropped below replacement level in every European country. There are MANY reasons for this, but one of them is that those policies result in people having no stake in the future of their nation. No stake in any future at all.

If this country's Democrat leaders were SANE, they would be fleeing from everything "Euro" like it they were covered with plague germs. The Dems are literally peddling death.

If we were sane, ALL retirement systems would require that payoffs depend on the performance of investments. There should not be any class of people who can say, "I don't care what happens to the country or the world, I got mine!"

Posted by John Weidner at October 22, 2007 6:50 AM

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